Lets Talk About Music Licensing…

At the Billboard Film & TV Festival today, the Guild of Music Supervisors met to discuss film and tv budgets. This panel was represented by Maureen Crowe (President of the Guild), John Houlihan (The Austin Powers series, Training Day), Madonna Wade Reed (Smallville, Felicity, Charlie’s Angels) and Jon McHugh (Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never).

At the Billboard Film & TV Festival today, the Guild of Music Supervisors met to discuss film and tv budgets. This panel was represented by Maureen Crowe (President of the Guild), John Houlihan (The Austin Powers series, Training Day), Madonna Wade Reed (Smallville, Felicity, Charlie’s Angels) and Jon McHugh (Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never).

Here is a summary of the panel.

Learn about Most Favoured Nation (MFN) clauses that are used a lot now. In a nutshell, MNF means if David Bowie took $6000 for licensing on one of his songs then thats the cap for any individual songs for that project. If the Foo Fighters were to get an opportunity to license a song in the same show/film/etc. they wouldn’t get more than the $6000 that was offered to David Bowie. Think of it as a cap. Google Most Favoured Nation to learn more.

Music Supervisors best friends are the clearance people. They have to have an honest and forthright relationship. Copyright is confusing and if the tracks aren’t “cleared” properly, than legal issues can arise. This is where the clearance people earn their keep.

If film budgets have to be paired down. contingency gets cut first and then music. If the music industry hasn’t suffered enough already, the film industry is adding to the devaluation of music in a very direct way. This sucks. This is why music supervisors have changed from using 80% Major label music and 20% indie music to the almost the exact opposite. Indie music has taken a large part of the pie because the cost of doing business is cheaper. The latest trend has indie music being replaced by score. This is dreadful and hopefully is just a trend.

Numbers

– Pitbull recently got $25,000 for a placement on a popular tv show. The rest of the music on the entire episode equated to under $1500.

– TV shows will spend as little as $1000 on all of the music on one particular episode so they can budget almost 100x more for later more important episodes. (Sweeps, holiday episodes, finales)

Performance Royalty Payouts

If you made $25,000 for that sync on Greys Anatomy thats great! $12,500 for the master usage and $12,500 for the major publishing company, thats if you are a major label artist. Based upon a complicated and often misunderstood calculation you then make money on re-broadcasts, etc. from the PRO’s which are represented by BMI, ASCAP and SESAC. This is often called “back end money”. These PRO’s revenues, in total, amount to over two billon dollars a year. Make sure your music is a part of one of the three performance royalty organizations!

Pitching Your Music

Get a song plugger or advocate on your side when pitching your music. Get your label, publisher and management team on board to help push your music onto these major impression channels. This is how you get the music supervisors to pay attention to you. Otherwise your music will be lost in a sea of emails that the supervisors get every single day. Get someone on your side plugging for you.